Played a game developed by Christian Blunden today to highlight why queues are a bad thing. The incredible thing that this game illustrates is that working only to the speed of the bottleneck (i.e. slowing down the activities that lead up to the bottleneck) actually improves overall throughput for the system.
Its a game I have watched Christian run and was keen to run it myself. The game is run in 3 rounds and round 1 has the most activity but the group today did not manage to finish any items in their 5 minutes. We changed things around a bit for the second round and there was a little less frantic activity and a few finished articles but lots of rejects because of poor quality. The third round had the least activity and was by far the calmest. People were able to focus on quality not quantity and despite the apparent relaxed attitude the group finished more items and their lead time to finishing a single item was 5 times less than the first round and 3 times less than the second round.
The following discussion was great as peolpe started to realise what impact the queues have on throughput and figuring out the best way to structure the team to prevent this from happening.
I’ll check with Christian to see if he is OK with me posting the details of the game before publishing it.
Brett's babble 